Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [229]
The staff usually tried to ignore Pulitzer at these moments—especially Cobb, who this time was suspended and then earned a bonus as his boss’s enthusiasm for scandal-mongering returned. Back in Pulitzer’s good graces, Cobb learned that he could earn even more if he could keep his publisher happy. “And you could not possibly please me more than by swearing to accept my criticism in the future without feeling hurt, even if it should seem to you to be wrong,” Pulitzer wrote. “Will you remember this? Swear!”
How to please Pulitzer eluded those who worked for him. One reporter, who had considerable tenure at the World, finally had the temerity to sum up the frustration in a note to the boss. “To the mottos of ‘Accuracy, terseness, accuracy’ that are now on the office walls,” he wrote to Pulitzer, “I would add another line—‘Forever Unsatisfied.’”
Within a month of his return to the United States, Pulitzer persuaded sixty-four-year-old William Merrill to retire and turn the editorial page over to Cobb. As soon as Merrill had packed up and left, Seitz received a telegram from Bar Harbor. “Please remove from door on the fourteenth floor the name and title of William Merrill and put on it the words: Mr. Ralph Pulitzer, Assistant Vice President.”
Merrill was wounded by Pulitzer’s callous treatment. At his desk in the Dakota, a famous gabled apartment building on the Upper West Side, he thought back to a time when Pulitzer had held a dinner for his editors at the house on Fifty-Fifth Street. “Don’t remember me, I pray you, by anything I may have done in anger,” Pulitzer had told them. Then, placing his hand on Merrill’s shoulder, he had continued, “There may have been a little difference between Merrill, here, and me, but we are now just as good friends as ever.”
Worried that he might not get a pension after nearly twenty years of working for Pulitzer, Merrill returned to the Boston Herald, from whence Pulitzer had plucked him years before. A few months later, he at last received a communication from his former employer, although it was indirect, as usual. Pulitzer, Butes wrote to Merrill, “never quite realized that he had lost a friend until he returned to New York, resumed his drives though the Park, recognized the Dakota and remembered that you were no longer there. It still seems impossible to him; he still cannot understand how such a thing could have happened.”
Before Merrill could feel sentimental, the next paragraph announced the true purpose of the correspondence. Merrill was asked to return the letters Pulitzer had written to him over the years. Pulitzer was worried that, should something happen to Merrill or Merrill’s wife, “there is no telling into whose hands those papers might fall, and how they might be misused.” Merrill complied but added that the severance of their friendship remained a mystery to him.
Ralph finally screwed up his courage and informed his parents of his intention to marry Frederica Webb. His selection of a member of one of New York City’s elite families was no surprise. Though Ralph worked at the World, he shared none of his father’s passion for politics or social causes. Tellingly, Ralph kept a photograph of J. P. Morgan on the bureau of his bedroom. In this regard, he was far more like his mother, particularly in his interest in high society. To the public, Ralph was a typical spoiled, protected scion of wealth. Two summers earlier, he had spent three weeks hunting and floating down the Missouri River in Montana in the company of a well-known guide. He proudly sent home a photograph of three bighorn sheep he